50 Years Ago, ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’ Shook the Auto World

A Chevy Corvair at Ralph Nader’s new American Museum of Tort Law, in his hometown of Winsted, Conn.CreditAndrew Sullivan for The New York Times

By Christopher Jensen

Nov. 26, 2015

FEW DRIVERS could imagine owning a car these days that did not come with airbags, antilock brakes and seatbelts. But 50 years ago motorists went without such basic safety features.

That was before a young lawyer named Ralph Nader came along with a book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” that would change the auto industry. It accused automakers of failing to make cars as safe as possible. Less than a year after the book was published, a balky Congress created the federal safety agency that became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — an agency whose stated mission is to save lives, prevent injuries and reduce crashes.

Today, even some of the book’s harshest critics acknowledge its impact.

“The book had a seminal effect,” Robert A. Lutz, who was a top executive at BMW, Ford Motor, Chrysler and General Motors, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t like Ralph Nader and I didn’t like the book, but there was definitely a role for government in automotive safety.”

If anything, he said, the regulations that followed leveled the playing field among automakers. “It sets ground rules where everybody has to do something and nobody has to worry” about being at a competitive disadvantage, he said.

Mr. Nader started researching automotive safety in 1956 as a second-year student at Harvard Law School and kept at it intermittently. He was inspired by books that prompted change, including Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which highlighted the dangers of the pesticide DDT to the environment.

“I aspired to the level of getting a law through, getting an agency to implement it,” he said.

About 1965, when he had a few chapters and an outline, he began sending them to publishers. Things did not go well. One publisher replied with a short note. The book, it said, would be “of interest primarily to insurance agents.”

Then Mr. Nader was approached by Richard L. Grossman, a New York publisher, who had read an article in The New Republic detailing Mr. Nader’s concerns about automotive safety. He asked Mr. Nader to write a book, though he doubted its sales potential.

“The issue about marketing that book always was, even if every word in it is true and everything about it is as outrageous as he says, do people want to read about that?” Mr. Grossman said in “An Unreasonable Man,” a 2007 documentary about Mr. Nader. Mr. Grossman died in 2014.

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The cover of the book "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader.CreditGrossman Publishers

On Nov. 30, 1965, “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile” was published. The first sentence did not mince words: “For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.”

The first chapter was aimed at the 1960-63 Chevrolet Corvair compact. Mr. Nader argued the rear-engine car had a suspension defect that made it easy for the driver to lose control and sometimes roll the car over. To this day, some Corvair enthusiasts dispute that assertion, although G.M. did make significant suspension changes starting with the 1965 model.

But most of the book focused on a long list of neglected safety issues ranging from brake performance to drivers’ being impaled by noncollapsible steering wheels and poor crash protection. The sharp-edged theme was that there was a “gap between existing design and attainable safety” and the auto industry was ignoring “moral imperatives” to make people safer.

It did not take long for the book to attract attention, including that of powerful legislators. In February 1966, Mr. Nader was asked by Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff, Democrat of Connecticut, to testify before a Senate subcommittee on automotive safety.

Joan Claybrook, who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the late 1970s and later headed Public Citizen, a group Mr. Nader founded, said he went far beyond writing the book to press his case.

“He played a critical role in a very subtle way by using contacts with the media, communicating with them almost every day, giving them new ideas and new stories, talking to whistle-blowers,” she said.

Mr. Nader’s campaign also got an enormous lift and more credibility after General Motors was caught having private investigators follow and investigate him. The automaker said it only wanted to know if Mr. Nader was working for any of the personal-injury lawyers in Corvair litigation. But at a meeting of his subcommittee, Senator Ribicoff scorned that explanation and said the investigation was “an attempt to downgrade and smear a man.” General Motors formally apologized.

By the spring of 1966, “Unsafe at Any Speed” was a best seller for nonfiction, along with Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Among those who greeted Mr. Nader’s success with dismay was Edward N. Cole, who was the general manager of Chevrolet when the Corvair was being developed in what was seen as a bold and innovative move to offer a more fuel-efficient small car. One of the people driving a Corvair was his son David.

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For Ralph Nader, the Chevy Corvair was the inspiration for the title of his famous book on auto safety.CreditAndrew Sullivan for The New York Times

“I don’t think he would ever had me driving a 1960 Corvair if he had any inclination there was a safety issue,” said David E. Cole, the former director of the University of Michigan Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation and currently the chairman of the nonprofit AutoHarvest Foundation.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Cole said his father — who died in 1977 in a plane crash — thought that Mr. Nader did not understand the complexity and trade-offs of automotive engineering and that the book encouraged people to sue the auto industry.

In September 1966 — about 10 months after the book was published — President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, requiring the adoption of new or upgraded vehicle safety standards, and creating an agency to enforce them and supervise safety recalls.

Suddenly, what consumer advocates saw as an unfettered auto industry was facing much stronger federal oversight.

A host of new or stronger safety requirements led — often after stiff opposition — to new technologies like airbags, antilock brakes, electronic stability control and, recently, rearview cameras and automatic braking.

Indeed, the death rate has dropped strikingly. In 1965, there were about five deaths for every 100 million miles traveled, according to the traffic safety agency. In 2014, the most recent year available, there was one death for every 100 million miles.

“If you just simply focus on things like the death toll, clearly the act has been a success,” said Clarence M. Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, which was founded in 1970 by Mr. Nader and Consumers Union, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

But Mr. Ditlow and Mr. Nader have long pushed for more stringent action from the traffic safety agency, whose leaders were often political appointees. A New York Times investigation last year found that the agency had often been slow to identify problems and reluctant to use its full legal powers against automakers.

“For most of N.H.T.S.A.’s life they weren’t fulfilling their mission,” Mr. Nader said.

Still, Mr. Nader sees reason for optimism. The recent crisis in auto safety, which started with General Motors’ disclosure that it had failed for more than a decade to disclose a deadly ignition switch defect, has led to a revived safety agency, which he said was “on the rise again.”

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